Episode 85: Fighting Disinformation with Storytelling (and Facts) with Charles Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resource

Charles is the president of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), a nonprofit that works with libraries, cultural institutions, and higher learning communities to improve research, teaching, and learning environments.

CLIR is supported primarily by annual dues from its over 180 sponsoring institutions, and individual donors. In 2021 the organization had close to $10 million in donations.

Through CLIR, Charles has been actively involved in creating the Digital Library of the Middle East, one of the world’s largest online archives of Middle Eastern and North African artifacts

How to Negotiate What is True and What is Not True?

We are in an era where there are innumerable facts available but making those facts coherent and building stories from those facts and creating narratives from those facts and items of information from that knowledge is very difficult. Part of this is the fragmentation of the digital world that would hunt billions of data points. Much of the information is separate and it is often difficult to find. When pulling a story together, you could get many different kinds of preferences you can pull in, but if you go to Google, you will have a hit of 100 million items which is difficult to touch. Most of them are just keywords. Most people do not even scroll past the first page so they are not seeing all the information given and just looking at the first couple of hits that Google gives and we seem to be comfortable with that as well. We have one narrative pitted against another narrative and that is basic to humanity. There are going to be alternate ideas for almost everything.

How to Fight Back and Say it is Not True?

If you start to say your worldview or your perspective or your narrative is false, then you almost always end up being ignored or the conservation gets truncated and there is very little debate about it. One of the most important challenges of problems that we have as a society is the absence of context. We ignore history and we do not see the deeper stories. We read headlines and breaking news and also get social media updates too. We’ve followed this pattern a lot when the information is given from these multiple platforms. It is at best footnotes but we still base so much news on them and policy on them which is astonishing. This does not give you any sense of context and it just isolates the individual and isolates the community. We have as a society and as a culture gotten to a point where things are very brief and insubstantial. It is a very difficult spot to be in if you are trying to address issues. The way we have structured information, and the way that we have organized or disorganized knowledge puts us at a distinct disadvantage to solve some of these bigger pictures. CLIR builds communities of practice and purposes. CLIR also constructs and publishes long narrative stories. They have a method to establish stories that are true stories that are real and personal and describe the situation. Likewise, they also have the technology and the management to assist in making a lot of cultural information that is currently unavailable to the public.

Valid Data Points VS What Data Points Should be Ignored

CLIR wants to have the information available to the public and be accessible from anywhere. The resources gathered at one point will eventually be used coherently and comprehensively as if they were one digital library. It sounds simple but it is difficult because there are so many incentives not to collaborate and to stand alone. Some people, organizations, and universities want to be alone so they can compete with their peers or get into a group that you recognize as appropriate to be your peers. It is a significant amount of tension. Libraries for years have had similar rankings like who has the most book, the most faculty, the most usage, and all kinds of these things. Back in 1950 to 1960, this would make sense but not in our world today and that is the big issue. You have to see things differently from the past and have to work together to get valid data points.

Contact Charles Henry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-henry-7007048

Learn more about Council on Library and Information Resources: https://www.clir.org


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